Wednesday, June 29, 2011

8 months for a Hit-and-Run

Elizabeth Beach-MacGeagh, 20, was knocked down as she crossed a street in Barnet by a BMW doing 45mph in a 30mph zone. The driver, Aryeris Angelis, sped off without stopping.

Tellingly, almost without exception the comments on this Standard article are incredulous about the light sentence.

The simple fact is that at 45MPH you may not even see someone step into the road before you hit them. At 30MPH you'll see them and have time to brake. 15MPH is the difference between a near miss and a fatal collision. Yet speeding is treated almost as a human right by the Transport Secretary Philip Hammond, who thinks speed cameras are part of a War on the Motorist. Now it could be argued that fixed speed cameras are not the best way of enforcing speed limits. But if you take that view, you have to come up with a better way, and you have to give a clear message that speed kills and speeding is not tolerated. Hammond has failed to do either of those things, and the result is that more motorists think it's OK to speed because the Government doesn't take it seriously.

1 comment:

  1. average speed cameras would be good. We'd never tolerate a train breaking speed limit. If there's one fatality on the trains, for a whole year they have stringent speed limits, but for motorists society seems to accept it.

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